Vision is Not a Group Activity

Like everyone, sometimes I have to learn the hard way, which doesn’t feel good at the time but has its benefits. And the lessons I learn aren’t always based on experience with my corporate performance improvement clients. Sometimes they’re based on my experience with my own small business – certainly small in comparison to the size of most of my clients.

But I’m not sure that matters, because sometimes what works for the little guy can work for the big companies too. You see, I run a business just like my clients do. Sure, mine is a lot smaller, but certain principles are universal.

2004 was the fourth year in business for my company, Breakthrough Management Group (BMG). We had grown well over 60 percent in 2003, and I decided it was time for us to grow up. It was time to start practicing what we preach to our clients.

Because of our extraordinary growth over the first four years, I always found it difficult to make any kind of a definitive plan. I had convinced myself that, at 60 percent growth, we were growing faster in a single quarter than most Fortune 500 companies grow in a year. So for us, planning a year in advance was like making a four-year plan.

Nonetheless, we started the strategic planning process, and the first step was to create a vision for the business. I thought it would be easy.  After all, as most companies know, the real work of an organization is executing plans, not making them.

Boy was I wrong!

I convened a meeting of the most senior leaders in the business, which included our general counsel, CFO, world-class trainers and performance excellence consultants. Who better to help create a vision for the company?

At least that’s what I thought going into the meeting. But very quickly I ran into a problem: everyone had a different vision, a different opinion of what the ideal future should be.  And some didn’t really have a vision at all.

Of course there were some suggestions, like “To be the best performance improvement company in the world,” and “We will serve all of the needs of our clients to drive performance excellence in their business.”
How else to say but that I felt disappointed – because to me the proposed visions lacked the element of Ideality. Rather than starting with the perfect future, the proposed visions started with current success and extrapolated that success forward.

The only problem with this is that gap between where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow is typically pretty small. While it can seem ambitious, it’s not nearly as ambitious as coming at it from the perspective of perfection.

The perfect future – now that’s a vision you want, even though you’re pretty certain to not achieve it. But in the process of trying, you’re more likely to move a greater distance from where you are today than you would be had you not defined the perfect state for yourself.

Strategic thinking and innovation expert Dr. George Land coined the phrase “backwards from perfect.” I like this because it says a lot. It says that you should completely disregard where you are today when deciding where you want to be tomorrow.

Think about it. Generally, which gap is larger: the gap between where you are today and where you think you can be tomorrow, or the gap between where you are today and where you would be if you were perfect?

As my team went through its visioning gyrations, I was thinking about the perfect future for BMG and its customers.  In the world of performance improvement and business excellence, what is the ultimate state of being?

To me the answer was this: “the principles of performance excellence shall become ubiquitous core competencies.” According to the American heritage dictionary, ubiquitous means “Being or seeming to be everywhere at the same time; omnipresent.”

That was it! In the perfect world, every organization would know and practice the principles of performance excellence like they are second nature.

I could say a lot more about what this means, but my message here is to tell you about why I think sometimes it’s best for the visionary leader to set the strategic direction, then rally everyone around that passionate, audacious goal.

So I found myself in a sort of conundrum, because I chose to involve so many people, and this made it difficult to simply declare a vision. That would send a damaging message to my team that I didn’t value their input. I did value their input; I just wasn’t getting what I wanted.

During this process, I realized that vision isn’t necessarily the property of all, a plan to be formed by consensus so it can be executed with community passion. I realized that not everyone is made to see into the future like Franklin or Edison.

We don’t all have 20/20 when it comes to envisioning the perfect future. And in a large organization, you only need a small handful of visionaries – or maybe even one – to move very large numbers of people. Just ask Gandhi or JFK or Jack Welch.

In large organizations, you have the visionary leader, usually the CEO, who sees 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 years into the future. Then you have the operational leader known as the COO, who leads the execution of strategy on a day-to-day basis.

I remember talking with a leader in a client company, a $1 billion telecommunications outfit. His people were frustrated by his lack of interest in Six Sigma and his preoccupation with more entrepreneurial concerns. And this frustrated him to some extent.

But who was he kidding? He was the entrepreneur. Did he really think the 5,000 people who reported to him, most making about $8 an hour, were all visionaries? Could they all share his passion or capability for entrepreneurship?

I don’t think so.

My problem with my team was now figuring out how to “steer” the visioning process until we got to my vision. That was the revelation I had – that it was MY vision that mattered and that creating a vision was not a group activity.

I’ll tell you that in the end I got a lot out of group participation, but not so much because my team helped me craft the vision, which ended up driven mostly by me. But in my effort to make my vision theirs, they helped me better articulate it, so it was clear to everyone, including me.

In the end, we decided that the vision would be this: “The principles of performance excellence shall become universal core competencies.” Note we changed the word ubiquitous to the word universal. This was the one compromise I made to make the vision more “palatable.”

My one message for any CEO is that you own the vision of your organization. You can and should harness the individual and collective passion of your direct reports, but, in the end, creating a vision is not a group activity.

Comments

[Rob]

I am new to the concept of Six Sigma. I am currently in my third year of Quality Improvement and have heard of this concept maybe three months ago and have become very interested in learning more about the tool. Given that I am currently in the Health Service field, I understand that many aspects of how to run an organization are quite behind to that of the corporate sector. I am looking to eventually progress to the corporate world soon, and hope that Six Sigma will give me the edge that I need. I am interested to see if you, the CEO of BMG, or anyone else out there had any feelings about Six Sigma and if it does make a difference in a perspective employees resume to have that certification on it.

[David Silverstein]

Rob, you ask good questions. Healthcare is currently BMG's biggest market (about 20% of our business). We work with over 50 hospitals and health insurance providers. You're right that things may be a bit "behind" in healthcare, but six sigma has picked up a lot of steam over the past few years. Healthcare organizations tend to be more "risk averse" for many reasons, so their adoption of new things is slower. But it's a process intensive industry that is ripe for six sigma. I just went to Monster.com and found 77 postings under health care looking for six sigma trained people. So yes, I believe it makes you more marketable today by having it on your resume.